Postcards from the Rogue Valley

It was an unimaginable tragedy.

“Thirty years of firefighting hadn’t prepared me for what happened that day,” recalls Kelly Burns, one of Rogue Valley’s most experienced firefighters. “Flames moved as fast as a bobcat could run.”

Many compelling stories begin with a crucible: a severe trial where intense forces interact to bring about significant change or create something new. 

In this story, the crucible is one of the most destructive wildfires in Oregon’s history and the something new is the remarkable Hispanic-led Coalición Fortaleza that rose from the ashes. 

Quickly nicknamed the Almeda Fire, the blaze wildfire fighter Burns calls a bobcat, began late on the morning of September 8, 2020 in an empty field near the northern edge of Ashland. Fueled by extreme heat, dry conditions, and powerful winds, the flames spread rapidly into nearby residential areas. Within hours, the fire became an inferno, storming the valley, following highways that connected Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, and Medford — a stretch of nine miles. 

Thirty-six hours later, fire crews from across the valley finally halted the fire’s catastrophic march. A headline in The New York Times declared it “Apocalyptic.”

Unlike most of the wildfires burning across the West Coast’s remote forests, the Almeda fire tore through densely populated neighborhoods. Its devastation was not measured by acres alone, but by the lives, homes, and communities left in its path.

Residents had little time to escape. Some who left for work were unable to return home. Traffic clogged evacuation routes as entire neighborhoods disappeared behind walls of smoke and flames.

By nightfall, homes and businesses across both Talent (pop. 6,282) and Phoenix (pop. 4,475) were burning. Local resident Shaban DeBey documented the unfolding disaster, sharing updates with neighbors as he watched flames move from house to house. His own home survived, but barely.

The fire was eventually stopped near Medford, preventing an even larger catastrophe. The following day, DeBey returned to Talent to witness the destruction firsthand. “The destruction is just unimaginable,” he said. “Never seen anything like this.”

The tally was stunning: 198 businesses, 19 trailer and manufactured home parks, and entire neighborhoods had been scarred or erased. Officials later estimated that the Almeda fire destroyed more than 2,800 structures. (Oregon Community Foundation, “Hard Lessons and Hope Emerge from Oregon’s Most Destructive Wildfire,” 2025)

The toll on the Latinx population

What the first headlines missed was the devastating toll the Almeda fire had taken on the area’s Latinx population: an estimated 16 percent of the residents of Talent and Phoenix and, some guess, over half of those displaced. The Phoenix-Talent School District reported a staggering 40 percent of its students — about 1,000 children — lost their homes, with Latinx students representing a major portion of this group. (Oregon Live, Sept. 27, 2020)

Over the previous two decades, the growth of the Latinx community in these towns (indeed, across Oregon) had fostered a vibrant, multicultural spirit in an otherwise non-Hispanic white state. There was the bustling La Placita, which operates both as a Latinx grocery and a swap-meet-style market along with stalls selling Latinx textiles, jewelry, and art. There was Unete, which since 1996 has defended the rights of farmworkers and immigrants across the valley.

The migration had also provided a steady regional workforce that included support staff for nearby medical, social service, and school facilities; (the largely invisible) kitchen helpers in restaurants and stockers in stores; the farmworkers who harvested the area’s growing fields at daybreak. A small professional “class” had emerged, too.

(Two feet from where I am writing I have an “online ordering-take out-pandemic-driven” receipt taped to the wall from a favorite Ashland restaurant that says, at the bottom: “IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA GREAT. They also cooked your food today.”)

From the start, though, the Achilles heel — a profound understatement — in the Latinx community’s settling in the valley had been affordable housing. In a region where the median house price hovers around $400,000, the manufactured home “estates” and trailer parks in Talent and Medford offered virtually the only housing available for those living paycheck to paycheck. 

For these old and new immigrants, along with some seniors on fixed incomes, the Almeda fire truly proved, in the words of The New York Times, apocalyptic. It is estimated that the fire incinerated close to 1,500 manufactured homes, and few owners or renters had insurance.

And it wasn’t just the financial losses that hurt. 78-year-old Joseph Powell, who used to open his door at Royal Oaks Mobile Manor to towering trees and a community of modest homes, said that all he saw when he returned was “torched vehicles and a sea of debris and charred tree limbs standing black against the sky.” (Oregon Public Broadcasting, Oct. 27, 2020)

Turning grief into possibility

Artist and community organizer Erica Alexia Ledesma remembers how, one month later, hundreds of Latinx families, now suddenly homeless, gathered at a Northwest Seasonal Workers Association membership meeting, searching for answers that landlords and public agencies could not provide. After graduating from the University of Oregon, Ledesma had moved back to Southern Oregon, her home, and, as she put it, “immediately got to community organizing.”

 As frustration filled the room that night, one community elder, Don Leonso Solis, stood and asked, “Why don’t we just buy our neighborhoods back?”

He continued: 

“Well, how much does a mobile home park cost? What if we just put our money together and buy one of these parks back and rebuild it? We have the landscapers, we have the construction workers, we have the plumbers. We have everyone that we need in our own community to build this housing. What is it gonna cost us?” 

Ledesma picks up the thread:

“People pulled out a calculator, they started to figure out how much money was in the room, and then my friend and I looked at each other. And Solis looked at us. He said, ‘you two, you went to college, look this up, figure it out.’” (Oregon Public Broadcasting, Sept. 5, 2025)

It seems that simple question, “why don’t we just buy our neighborhoods back,” transformed grief into possibility that night.

Inspired by Solis’s vision, community members, organizers, volunteers, and local leaders came together to form Coalición Fortaleza, with Ledesma its founders.  

Reclaiming our future

Ledesma and her team moved as fast as the Alameda Fire.

“Drawing on decades of lived experience confronting racism, environmental injustice, housing inequality, and economic exploitation, we launched a community-led campaign to document our losses, identify community-driven solutions, and reclaim our future,” the Coalición Fortaleza’s website explains.

The first action was to partner with Community and Shelter Assistance (CASA) of Oregon to conduct a hyper-local housing study that combined existing survey data and storytelling to capture the experiences of the Latinx community impacted by the Almeda Fire. The results, they hoped, would help inform housing recovery efforts overall and, in particular, the re-envisioning of communal homeownership among Latinx mobile-home communities in the valley.

One of the first programs the study pointed to was the importance of “wealth building” in a community where impoverishment has been systemic. For Coalición Fortaleza, this involved small steps as well as larger connections. In its first year, the organization distributed $90,000, providing emergency funds for 18 families and a car for a fire survivor. To date, it has distributed $356,500 for these just-in-time resources — along with free bus passes. Larger connections included free financial planning as well as securing real dollars through Oregon’s Individual Development Accounts program. A Latino Entrepreneurship Network that would provide bilingual training and mentorship took shape.

“Collective healing” also took center stage. In 2024, El Mercadito emerged from a community call to create more spaces to gather and celebrate Latinx culture through food, music, art, and other activities. This year’s event included more than 30 vendors, a talent show, family friendly activities, resources and services, and local DJs.

The first resident-owned community in Jackson Country

From the start, Coalición Fortaleza had its eyes on answering Don Leonso Solis’s question, “Why don’t we just buy our neighborhoods back?” 

Here again, CASA of Oregon stepped in, waging a three-year campaign to purchase Talent Mobile Estates, where all but 10 of its 100 manufactured homes had been destroyed in the Almeda Fire. 

A team of Coalición Fortaleza volunteers set to work drawing up blueprints and plans for their new neighborhood.  “Even if we don’t know English, we’re going to be heard,” CASA’s Alberta Villa made clear.

The group was breaking new ground. Normally at a manufactured home park, even if residents own their home, they lease the lot it sits on; they’re at the mercy of the park owners. By owning the land as a community, these residents would be able to live in the park for life without worrying about rent hikes or the land being repurposed. They could make decisions based on what’s best for the community, instead of being motivated by profit.

In the fall of 2024, the Talent Community Cooperative — formerly Talent Mobile Estates —opened with 74 new, sleek resident-owned units. For the new Latinx owners, Ledesma explains, it harkened back to the small Mexican village where everyone knew everyone else and cared for each other. “It felt like home.”

Fresh on the heels of this victory, Coalición Fortaleza returned to another of its longstanding dreams: to provide much needed housing for agricultural workers displaced by the Almeda Fire. Summit Gardens, with its projected 34 units, will target agricultural families whose income puts them below the federal poverty line.

Micro-farm campesina

On a bright May morning two months ago, Coalición Fortaleza’s co-founder, Niria Alicia Garcia (along with her infant daughter) and two dozen of the group’s supporters have gathered under a pole barn in a Talent to inaugurate yet another groundbreaking enterprise: a micro farm. 

“We gather here today to express our deepest gratitude to the original stewards of the land on which we stand, the Takelma, Latgawa, Klamath and Modoc Tribes. We gather today to lend our collective labor to regenerate these lands, contribute to the healing of water ways, and share our traditional knowledge to nurture the health and beauty of our Valley.”

Garcia and her team are joining a small nationwide movement of Latina-led, small-scale micro enterprises and cooperative farming initiatives  — called campesinas — focused on agricultural stewardship and economic independence. California, Washington, Arizona, and New Mexico, with their high percentage of female, Latina farmworkers, are other players.

After a year (?) searching for a small farm, ideally one well-tended by its departing owners,   Coalición Fortaleza entered into a contract to purchase a six-acre cow farm with water/irrigation rights and a fresh water spring on a hill above Talent. They signed on March 8^th, International Women’s Day, and closed on April 22nd, Earth Day.

It is a grand vision. 

On this land, Coalición Fortaleza hopes to bring the community together to design a regenerative economic model rooted in collective care and shared leadership. They aim, too, to restore an ancestral freshwater spring and revive traditions that reconnect us to the natural world and to one another. 

They dream of creating a living classroom, planting, cultivating, and preserving heirloom seeds while passing on traditional ecological knowledge to future generations. In a landscape shaped by climate change and pesticide-intensive agriculture, the farm, however small, will demonstrate a model of regenerative micro-farming that restores soil, water, biodiversity, and community resilience.

“More than a farm,” Garcia adds, “this will be a gathering place where families come together to celebrate cultural traditions, hold ceremonies, share meals, and strengthen relationships across generations.”

Coalición Fortaleza’s goal is to raise $1.3 million for the project. As of June 30^th, 2026, it had reached 50 percent of this goal.

For the Latinx community devastated by the Almeda Fire, the day feels like a gigantic milestone. 

 “We believe that recovery is about more than rebuilding what was lost,” Erica Alexia Ledesma  explains. “It is about creating communities where everyone belongs, where power is shared, and where justice, equity, and self-determination shape the future we build together.”